[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Mike Davis on megaclimatic change

[Patrick Bond]

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174949/mike_davis_welcome_to_the_next_epoch

Mike Davis, Welcome to the Next Epoch

(Intro by Tom)

For those who didn't happen to notice, perhaps because it wasn't exactly 
front-page news in most of the country, NASA's James Hansen, the man who 
first alerted Congress to the dangers of global warming 20 years ago, 
returned to testify before the House Select Committee on Energy 
Independence and Global Warming this week. This time around, he was 
essentially offering a final warning on the subject. Unless the U.S. 
begins to act soon, he pointed out, "it will become impractical to 
constrain atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced in 
burning fossil fuels, to a level that prevents the climate system from 
passing tipping points that lead to disastrous climate changes that 
spiral dynamically out of humanity's control."

For the "elements of a 'perfect storm,' a global cataclysm" being 
assembled, he placed special blame on the "CEOs of fossil energy 
companies [who] know what they are doing and are aware of [the] 
long-term consequences of continued business as usual." He added that 
they should, in his opinion, "be tried for high crimes against humanity 
and nature… I anticipate testifying against relevant CEOs in future 
public trials." That's a novel thought in our nation's capital. Oh, and 
while he was at it, he probably should have thrown in George W., Dick 
C., and crew. What they haven't done (and what they've blocked from 
being done) over these last eight years may turn out to be their 
greatest crime of all. Talk about smoking guns... or is it melting ice?

And here's the sad thing, as with so much else in these last years, the 
only way global warming has gotten the slightest respect in Bush's 
Washington is as a national security issue. Big surprise. The Navy, for 
instance, was already holding a symposium entitled "Naval operations in 
an Ice-Free Arctic" in April 2001; now, it seems that by 2010, or 2015 
at the latest, it may have its wish -- an iceless Arctic Ocean in the 
summer for the first time in perhaps one million years and a scramble 
for energy and mineral wealth at the poles. An office of the Pentagon, 
war-gaming climate change back in 2004, wrote up a hair-raising, 
spine-tingling end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it report on a future planet 
in eternal conflict amid every kind of weather disaster; and only this 
week, the U.S. Intelligence Community, the official 16 agencies 
gathering the stuff for the government, chimed in with a grim new 
report, "The National Security Implications of Global Climate Change 
Through 2030."

As "National Security and the Threat of Climate Change," a 2007 report 
from the military-allied research organization, the CNA Corporation, 
indicated, admirals and generals galore have been worrying about the 
subject for a while. Think, for instance, of those low-lying U.S. bases, 
like the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, that might just go 
under. Could climate change not only send millions fleeing from flooding 
or salinating lowlands, or out of areas of conflict over ever scarcer 
resources, but start the process of de-garrisoning the globe for the 
Pentagon? ("Climate change could compromise some of [our] bases…[T]he 
loss of some forward bases would require longer range lift and strike 
capabilities and would increase the military's energy needs.") It's 
enough to set a military-minded group to worrying.

Now, in a striking report from the front lines of science, Mike Davis, 
TomDispatch regular and author most recently of In Praise of Barbarians: 
Essays Against Empire, "welcomes" the new geologic era we're officially 
entering, a period in which humanity may simply, and catastrophically, 
outrun history itself. Tom

Living on the Ice Shelf
Humanity's Melt Down
By Mike Davis

1. Farewell to the Holocene

Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 
years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has 
yet printed its scientific obituary.

This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of 
the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire 
State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society 
of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column.

The London Society is the world's oldest association of Earth 
scientists, founded in 1807, and its Commission acts as a college of 
cardinals in the adjudication of the geological time-scale. 
Stratigraphers slice up Earth's history as preserved in sedimentary 
strata into hierarchies of eons, eras, periods, and epochs marked by the 
"golden spikes" of mass extinctions, speciation events, and abrupt 
changes in atmospheric chemistry.

In geology, as in biology or history, periodization is a complex, 
controversial art and the most bitter feud in nineteenth-century British 
science -- still known as the "Great Devonian Controversy" -- was fought 
over competing interpretations of homely Welsh Graywackes and English 
Old Red Sandstone. More recently, geologists have feuded over how to 
stratigraphically demarcate ice age oscillations over the last 2.8 
million years. Some have never accepted that the most recent 
inter-glacial warm interval -- the Holocene -- should be distinguished 
as an "epoch" in its own right just because it encompasses the history 
of civilization.

As a result, contemporary stratigraphers have set extraordinarily 
rigorous standards for the beatification of any new geological 
divisions. Although the idea of the "Anthropocene" -- an Earth epoch 
defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological 
force -- has been long debated, stratigraphers have refused to 
acknowledge compelling evidence for its advent.

At least for the London Society, that position has now been revised.

To the question "Are we now living in the Anthropocene?" the 21 members 
of the Commission unanimously answer "yes." They adduce robust evidence 
that the Holocene epoch -- the interglacial span of unusually stable 
climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban 
civilization -- has ended and that the Earth has entered "a 
stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several 
million years." In addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the 
stratigraphers cite human landscape transformation which "now exceeds 
[annual] natural sediment production by an order of magnitude," the 
ominous acidification of the oceans, and the relentless destruction of 
biota.

This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose 
closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene 
Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability 
expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that "the 
combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread 
replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is 
producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These 
effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from 
surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks." 
Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.

2. Spontaneous Decarbonization?

The Commission's coronation of the Anthropocene coincides with growing 
scientific controversy over the 4th Assessment Report issued last year 
by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is 
mandated to establish scientific baselines for international efforts to 
mitigate global warming, but some of the most prominent researchers in 
the field are now challenging its reference scenarios as overly 
optimistic, even pie-in-the-sky thinking.

The current scenarios were adopted by the IPCC in 2000 to model future 
global emissions based on different "storylines" about population growth 
as well as technological and economic development. Some of the Panel's 
major scenarios are well known to policymakers and greenhouse activists, 
but few outside the research community have actually read or understood 
the fine print, particularly the IPCC's confidence that greater energy 
efficiency will be an "automatic" byproduct of future economic 
development. Indeed all the scenarios, even the "business as usual" 
variants, assume that at least 60% of future carbon reduction will occur 
independently of greenhouse mitigation measures.

The Panel, in effect, has bet the ranch, or rather the planet, on 
unplanned, market-driven progress toward a post-carbon world economy, a 
transition that implicitly requires wealth generated from higher energy 
prices ultimately finding its way to new technologies and renewable 
energy. (The International Energy Agency recently estimated that it 
would cost $45 trillion to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.) 
Kyoto-type accords and carbon markets are designed -- almost as an 
analogue to Keynesian "pump-priming" -- to bridge the shortfall between 
spontaneous decarbonization and the emissions targets required by each 
scenario. Serendipitously, this reduces the costs of mitigating global 
warming to levels that align with what seems, at least theoretically, to 
be politically possible, as expounded in the British Stern Review on the 
Economics of Climate Change of 2006 and other such reports.

Critics argue, however, that this represents a heroic leap of faith that 
radically understates the economic costs, technological hurdles, and 
social changes required to tame the growth of greenhouse gases. European 
carbon emissions, for example, are still rising (dramatically in some 
sectors) despite the European Union's much praised adoption of a 
cap-and-trade system in 2005. Likewise there has been little evidence in 
recent years of the automatic progress in energy efficiency that is the 
sine qua non of the IPCC scenarios. Although The Economist 
characteristically begs to differ, most energy researchers believe that, 
since 2000, energy intensity has actually risen; that is, global carbon 
dioxide emissions have kept pace with, or even grown marginally faster 
than, energy use.

Coal production, especially, is undergoing a dramatic renaissance, as 
the nineteenth century has returned to haunt the twenty-first century. 
Hundreds of thousands of miners are now working under conditions that 
would have appalled Charles Dickens, extracting the dirty mineral that 
allows China to open two new coal-fueled power stations every week. 
Meanwhile, the total consumption of fossil fuels is predicted to 
increase at least 55% over the next generation, with international oil 
exports doubling in volume.

The United Nations Development Program, which has made its own study of 
sustainable energy goals, warns that it will require "a 50 percent cut 
in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2050 against 1990 levels" to 
keep humanity outside the red zone of runaway warming (usually defined 
as a greater than two degrees centigrade increase this century). Yet the 
International Energy Agency predicts that, in all likelihood, such 
emissions will actually increase in this period by nearly 100% -- enough 
greenhouse gas to propel us past several critical tipping points.

Even while higher energy prices are pushing SUVs towards extinction and 
attracting more venture capital to renewable energy, they are also 
opening the Pandora's box of the crudest of crude oil production from 
Canadian tar sands and Venezuelan heavy oil. As one British scientist 
has warned, the very last thing we should wish for (under the false 
slogan of "energy independence") is new frontiers in hydrocarbon 
production that advance "humankind's ability to accelerate global 
warming" and slow the urgent transition to "non-carbon or closed-carbon 
energy cycles."

3. Fin-du-Monde Boom

What confidence should we place in the capacity of markets to reallocate 
investment from old to new energy or, say, from arms expenditures to 
sustainable agriculture? We are propagandized incessantly (especially on 
public television) about how giant companies like Chevron, Pfizer Inc., 
and Archer Daniels Midland are hard at work saving the planet by plowing 
profits back into the kinds of research and exploration that will ensure 
low-carbon fuels, new vaccines, and more drought-resistant crops.

As the current ethanol-from-corn boom, which has diverted 100 million 
tons of grain from human diets mainly to American car engines, so 
appallingly demonstrates, "biofuel" may be a euphemism for subsidies to 
the rich and starvation for the poor. Likewise "clean coal," despite a 
vigorous endorsement from Senator Barack Obama (who also champions 
ethanol), is, at present, simply a huge deception: a $40 million 
advertising and lobbying campaign for a hypothetical technology that 
BusinessWeek has characterized as "being decades away from commercial 
viability."

Moreover there are disturbing signs that energy companies and utilities 
are reneging on their public commitments to the development of 
carbon-capture and alternative energy technologies. The Bush 
administration's "marquee demonstration project," FutureGen, was 
scrapped this year after the coal industry refused to pay its share of 
the public-private "partnership"; similarly, most U.S. private-sector 
carbon-sequestration initiatives have recently been cancelled. In the 
United Kingdom, meanwhile, Shell has just pulled out of the world's 
largest wind-energy project, the London Array. Despite heroic levels of 
advertising, energy corporations, like pharmaceutical companies, prefer 
to overgraze the commons, while letting taxes, not profits, pay for 
whatever urgent, long-overdue research is actually undertaken.

On the other hand, the spoils from high energy prices continue to gush 
into real estate, skyscrapers, and financial assets. Whether or not we 
are actually at the summit of Hubbert's Peak -- that peak oil moment -- 
whether or not the oil-price bubble finally bursts, what we are probably 
witnessing is the largest transfer of wealth in modern history.

An eminent Wall Street oracle, McKinsey Global Institute, predicts that 
if crude oil prices remain above $100 per barrel -- they are, at the 
moment, approaching $140 a barrel -- the six countries of the Gulf 
Cooperation Council alone will "reap a cumulative windfall of almost $9 
trillion by 2020." As in the 1970s, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbors, 
whose total gross domestic product has almost doubled in just three 
years, are awash in liquidity: $2.4 trillion in banks and investment 
funds according to a recent estimate by The Economist. Regardless of 
price trends, the International Energy Agency predicts, "more and more 
oil will come from fewer and fewer countries, primarily the Middle East 
members of OPEC [The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries]."

Dubai, which has little oil income of its own, has become the regional 
financial hub for this vast pool of wealth, with ambitions to eventually 
compete with Wall Street and the City of London. During the first oil 
shock in the 1970s, much of OPEC's surplus was recycled through military 
purchases in the United States and Europe, or parked in foreign banks to 
become the "subprime" loans that eventually devastated Latin America. In 
the wake of the attacks of 9/11, the Gulf states became far more 
cautious about entrusting their wealth to countries, like the United 
States, governed by religious fanatics. This time around, they are using 
"sovereign wealth funds" to achieve a more active ownership in foreign 
financial institutions, while investing fabulous amounts of oil revenue 
to transform Arabia's sands into hyperbolic cities, shopping paradises, 
and private islands for British rock stars and Russian gangsters.

Two years ago, when oil prices were less than half of the current level, 
The Financial Times estimated that planned new construction in Saudi 
Arabia and the emirates already exceeded $1 trillion dollars. Today, it 
may be closer to $1.5 trillion, considerably more than the total value 
of world trade in agricultural products. Most of the Gulf city-states 
are building hallucinatory skylines -- and, among them, Dubai is the 
unquestionable superstar. In a little more than a decade, it has erected 
500 skyscrapers, and currently leases one-quarter of all the high-rise 
cranes in the world.

This super-charged Gulf boom, which celebrity architect Rem Koolhaas 
claims is "reconfiguring the world," has led Dubai developers to 
proclaim the advent of a "supreme lifestyle" represented by seven-star 
hotels, private islands, and J-class yachts. Not surprisingly, then, the 
United Arab Emirates and its neighbors have the biggest per capita 
ecological footprints on the planet. Meanwhile, the rightful owners of 
Arab oil wealth, the masses crammed into the angry tenements of Baghdad, 
Cairo, Amman, and Khartoum, have little more to show for it than a 
trickle-down of oil-field jobs and Saudi-subsidized madrassas. While 
guests enjoy the $5,000 per night rooms in Burj Al-Arab, Dubai's 
celebrated sail-shaped hotel, working-class Cairenes riot in the streets 
over the unaffordable price of bread.

4. Can Markets Enfranchise the Poor?

Emissions optimists, of course, will smile at all the gloom-and-doom and 
evoke the coming miracle of carbon trading. What they discount is the 
real possibility that a sprawling carbon-offset market may emerge, just 
as predicted, yet produce only minimal improvement in the global carbon 
balance sheet, as long as there is no mechanism for enforcing real net 
reductions in fossil fuel use.

In popular discussions of emissions-rights trading systems, it is common 
to mistake the smokestacks for the trees. For example, the wealthy oil 
enclave of Abu Dhabi (like Dubai, a partner in the United Arab Emirates) 
brags that it has planted more than 130 million trees -- each of which 
does its duty in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, 
this artificial forest in the desert also consumes huge quantities of 
irrigation water produced, or recycled, from expensive desalination 
plants. The trees may allow Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed to wear a halo at 
international meetings, but the rude fact is that they are an 
energy-intensive beauty strip, like most of so-called green capitalism.

And, while we're at it, let's just ask: What if the buying and selling 
of carbon credits and pollution offsets fails to turn down the 
thermostat? What exactly will motivate governments and global industries 
then to join hands in a crusade to reduce emissions through regulation 
and taxation?

Kyoto-type climate diplomacy assumes that all the major actors, once 
they have accepted the science in the IPCC reports, will recognize an 
overriding common interest in gaining control over the runaway 
greenhouse effect. But global warming is not War of the Worlds, where 
invading Martians are dedicated to annihilating all of humanity without 
distinction. Climate change, instead, will initially produce 
dramatically unequal impacts across regions and social classes. It will 
reinforce, not diminish, geopolitical inequality and conflict.

As the United Nations Development Program emphasized in its report last 
year, global warming is above all a threat to the poor and the unborn, 
the "two constituencies with little or no political voice." Coordinated 
global action on their behalf thus presupposes either their 
revolutionary empowerment (a scenario not considered by the IPCC) or the 
transmutation of the self-interest of rich countries and classes into an 
enlightened "solidarity" without precedent in history. From a 
rational-actor perspective, the latter outcome only seems realistic if 
it can be shown that privileged groups possess no preferential "exit" 
option, that internationalist public opinion drives policymaking in key 
countries, and that greenhouse gas mitigation could be achieved without 
major sacrifices in upscale Northern Hemispheric standards of living -- 
none of which seems highly likely.

And what if growing environmental and social turbulence, instead of 
galvanizing heroic innovation and international cooperation, simply 
drive elite publics into even more frenzied attempts to wall themselves 
off from the rest of humanity? Global mitigation, in this unexplored but 
not improbable scenario, would be tacitly abandoned (as, to some extent, 
it already has been) in favor of accelerated investment in selective 
adaptation for Earth's first-class passengers. We're talking here of the 
prospect of creating green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an 
otherwise stricken planet.

Of course, there will still be treaties, carbon credits, famine relief, 
humanitarian acrobatics, and perhaps the full-scale conversion of some 
European cities and small countries to alternative energy. But the shift 
to low, or zero, emission lifestyles would be almost unimaginably 
expensive. (In Britain, it currently costs $200,000 more to build a 
zero-carbon, "level 6" eco-home than a standard unit of the same area.) 
And this will certainly become even more unimaginable after perhaps 
2030, when the convergent impacts of climate change, peak oil, peak 
water, and an additional 1.5 billion people on the planet may begin to 
seriously throttle growth.

5. The North's Ecological Debt

The real question is this: Will rich counties ever mobilize the 
political will and economic resources to actually achieve IPCC targets 
or, for that matter, to help poorer countries adapt to the inevitable, 
already "committed" quotient of warming now working its way toward us 
through the slow circulation of the world ocean?

To be more vivid: Will the electorates of the wealthy nations shed their 
current bigotry and walled borders to admit refugees from predicted 
epicenters of drought and desertification like the Maghreb, Mexico, 
Ethiopia, and Pakistan? Will Americans, the most miserly people when 
measured by per capita foreign aid, be willing to tax themselves to help 
relocate the millions likely to be flooded out of densely settled, 
mega-delta regions like Bangladesh?

Market-oriented optimists, once again, will point to carbon offset 
programs like the Clean Development Mechanism which, they claim, will 
allow green capital to flow to the Third World. Most of the Third World, 
however, probably prefers for the First World to acknowledge the 
environmental mess it has created and take responsibility for cleaning 
it up. They rightly rail against the notion that the greatest burden of 
adjustment to the Anthropocene epoch should fall on those who have 
contributed least to carbon emissions and drawn the slightest benefits 
from 200 years of industrialization.

In a sobering study recently published in the Proceedings of the [U.S.] 
National Academy of Science, a research team has attempted to calculate 
the environmental costs of economic globalization since 1961 as 
expressed in deforestation, climate change, over-fishing, ozone 
depletion, mangrove conversion, and agricultural expansion. After making 
adjustments for relative cost burdens, they found that the richest 
countries, by their activities, had generated 42% of environmental 
degradation across the world, while shouldering only 3% of the resulting 
costs.

The radicals of the South will rightly point to another debt as well. 
For 30 years, cities in the developing world have grown at breakneck 
speed without any equivalent public investment in infrastructure 
services, housing, or public health. In large part this has been the 
result of foreign debts contracted by dictators, payments enforced by 
the International Monetary Fund, and public sectors wrecked by the World 
Bank's "structural adjustment" agreements.

This planetary deficit of opportunity and social justice is captured in 
the fact that more than one billion people, according to UN-Habitat, 
currently live in slums and that their number is expected to double by 
2030. An equal number, or more, forage in the so-called informal sector 
(a first-world euphemism for mass unemployment). Sheer demographic 
momentum, meanwhile, will increase the world's urban population by 3 
billion people over the next 40 years (90% of them in poor cities), and 
no one -- absolutely no one -- has a clue how a planet of slums, with 
growing food and energy crises, will accommodate their biological 
survival, much less their inevitable aspirations to basic happiness and 
dignity.

If this seems unduly apocalyptic, consider that most climate models 
project impacts that will uncannily reinforce the present geography of 
inequality. One of the pioneer analysts of the economics of global 
warming, Petersen Institute fellow William R. Cline, recently published 
a country-by-country study of the likely effects of climate change on 
agriculture by the later decades of this century. Even in the most 
optimistic simulations, the agricultural systems of Pakistan (a 20% 
decrease from current farm output predicted) and Northwestern India (a 
30% decrease) are likely to be devastated, along with much of the Middle 
East, the Maghreb, the Sahel belt, Southern Africa, the Caribbean, and 
Mexico. Twenty-nine developing countries will lose 20% or more of their 
current farm output to global warming, while agriculture in the already 
rich north is likely to receive, on average, an 8% boost.

In light of such studies, the current ruthless competition between 
energy and food markets, amplified by international speculation in 
commodities and agricultural land, is only a modest portent of the chaos 
that could soon grow exponentially from the convergence of resource 
depletion, intractable inequality, and climate change. The real danger 
is that human solidarity itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will 
suddenly fracture and shatter into a thousand shards.

Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against 
Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the 
Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, 
poverty, and global change.

[Note for TomDispatch readers: Those of you who are environmentally 
minded and interested in pursuing such matters further might consider 
spending some time at the superb website of Grist Magazine and visiting, 
as well, an interesting and provocative new online magazine/website, 
Environment 360. Tom]

Copyright 2008 Mike Davis